In general, the present application relates to a fluorescent-image acquisition apparatus, a fluorescent-image acquisition method adopted by the fluorescent-image acquisition apparatus and a fluorescent-image acquisition program implementing the fluorescent-image acquisition method. For example, the present application can be well applied to a field in which a fluorescently-stained tissue segment is observed.
A tissue segment firmly held on a slide glass plate is a typical biological sample. If necessary, the tissue segment is stained before being kept somewhere. In general, when the tissue-segment keeping period becomes long, the tissue segment deteriorates and/or the color of the tissue segment fades away. Usually, a microscope is used for observing a tissue segment serving as a biological sample. If the tissue segment has deteriorated and/or the color of the tissue segment has faded away, however, visibility provided by the microscope as the visibility of the tissue segment becomes bad. In addition, in some cases, such a biological sample is diagnosed at a facility outside a hospital at which the sample has been produced. In such cases, the biological sample is generally sent from the hospital to the facility by mail. That is to say, it takes time to send the biological sample from the hospital to the facility.
In order to solve the problem described above, there has been proposed an apparatus for keeping a biological sample as image data. For further information on such an apparatus, the reader is suggested to refer to documents such as Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2003-222801.